Learn Together – Fit Kids in Europe Eat Healthy Erasmus Project

Project Title

Learn Together – Fit Kids in Europe Eat Healthy

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Health and wellbeing; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; Agriculture, forestry and fisheries

Project Summary

The KIGGS-Study (RKI) from 2018 showed that in Germany 15% of children aged 3-17 are overweight (6% even obese). Only 22,4% of all girls in that age group and 29,4% of the boys reached the time ratio for movement/sports per day recommended by WHO. The researchers also found a significant correlation between low socio-economic background and the aforementioned problems. The results of this long-term study have been stable since the beginning of data collection in 2003. This means that no efficient measures have been found yet to fight the problem.
Recognizing the important role of a healthy diet and sufficient movement for young learners at primary school level has brought together the partners from Finland, France, Germany and Greece in the our Project “Fit kids in Europe eat healthy”. We saw a high developmental potential for our schools and were at the same time confronted with many different approaches offered to us by different initiatives on the national level. To find out what suits each of us individually best we wanted to go on the journey together with our partners – Exploring together and consulting with each other in a very intense work period of 2 years, putting nutrition and sports on top of your developmental priority list. The main objective was to identify elements that should be permanently installed in the schools pedagogical profiles to promote the health of our learners and as a consequence create a solid basis for their learning, working and being active minds at all stages of life.
Altogether 4 schools with about 70 teachers and more than 700 pupils participated in the project integrating also the parents and the local community during some project activities. Thanks to the open project structure all members of our schools had the chance to participate.
We had planned activities that were involving the children and offered them a variety of access points to explore topics related to their health. During most activities they were connected to pupils of the partner schools virtually or by sending each other small products via regular mail. But some schools also sent or hosted pupils so that the European spirit became more tangible for the children. They learnt from multiple perspectives about keeping their bodies fit, but beyond that they also enhanced their general self-competence, media competence, their motivation to learn languages, their intercultural competences and their awareness of European citizenship. An outstanding product on the pupils’ side is the cookbook. It grew over the two and a half years topic-oriented and was filled with recipes from the partner countries.The planned sale of the cookbook could unfortunately not be realized as planned since lockdown circumstances prevented us from bigger closing events where the book was planned to be sold.
The teachers accompanied pupils’ activities but were also involved in special teachers’ activities. Their professional growth was nourished by building up a solid knowledge base related to teaching health aspects but also by the general exchange with colleagues from the partner schools. Regular moderated discussions were open to all interested teachers and the job shadowing visits were a fruitful addition that brought teachers closer together and fostered intense collegial counseling. Our project was a laboratory for development and we still think that this development is a pressing one for many schools in our countries.
In the regional school networks our experiences with the general management of an EU school project were shared, other planned dissemination activities in the local school districts could not be realized to date since currently other topics are more pressing on the agenda.
We have made a big step forward but will still continue developing ideas to foster the wellbeing of our pupils. In the last year healthy living in a digital society has become a more prominent topic for example. This is a topic that needs our attention and also hygienic standards and shared cooking is a new dimension that we still need to work on.

Source: https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/Gesundheitsmonitoring/Gesundheitsberichterstattung/GBEDownloadsJ/Journal-of-Health-Monitoring_01_2018_KiGGS-Welle2_erste_Ergebnisse.pdf?__blob=publicationFile

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 61503 Eur

Project Coordinator

Grundschule Sprendlingen & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Huhtisen koulu
• 5th Primary School of Aghios Nikolaos
• Ecole Primaire Publique de Frontenac
• Istituto Comprensivo Uggiano La Chiesa